Thursday, May 20, 2010

The gods heroes must be crazy

Close your eyes and imagine the days when some greisly copy editor would have put a query into the margin:

An article on Monday about two journeyman forwards who are trying to make the United States soccer team referred imprecisely to the source of the given names in the family of Herculez Gomez, one of the players. While he, his brother Ulysses and his other siblings take their names from Greek mythology, each was not named after a Greek god.

Herculez Gomez, like each of his four siblings, was named after a Greek hero. Edson Buddle was named after a Brazilian one -- Pele, the soccer deity whose given name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento.

Hmm. We can be pretty sure where the offending "Greek god" went -- there's the "each" in the preceding phrase, and there's the "soccer deity" in the second sentence. But it's actually a little annoying that -- rather than just appending the correction -- the story itself is corrected in Lexis. That could raise some concerns about Lexis as a tool for content analysis, and that ain't good.